BitBeat: GAW Miners to Launch Bitcoin Challenger, Paycoin

Josh Garza, who has built what may be the world’s fastest growing bitcoin mining operation, is setting his sights on something even bigger: ‘the cryptocurrency of the future.’
That’s the claim made in a press statement Monday to mark the launch of the ICO (initial coin offering) of Paycoin, a digital currency that Mr. Garza’s GAW Miners company says will address ‘all the inherent shortcomings that have prevented bitcoin from achieving mainstream adoption.’
The core technology underlying Paycoin, which was previously codenamed ‘Hashcoin,’ is modeled on bitcoin and its public ledger, known as the blockchain. However, Paycoin’s blockchain is independent of bitcoin’s and, unlike the better known digital currency, will involve an additional layer of ‘mining’ computers beyond the base level of miners employed to routinely confirm the validity of transactions and to maintain the ledger. Those higher-level ‘controller’ miners will perform the special task of compressing data to make Paycoin transactions more streamlined. The controllers will periodically bid for the right to perform this task, for which they will be rewarded in paycoins. In theory, their contributions to computing efficiency should allow Paycoin transactions to be confirmed and settled much faster than the 10-minute minimum that applies to bitcoin.

This post was published at Wall Street Journal on Nov 25, 2014.